half the population doesn’t have insurance it’s true but that is because ER care is generally free so the incentive to have insurance is thereby lowered -I’m not claiming this is the main reason but it is definitely one.
Also many proponents of universal care are satisfied with how their national systems work. They get their drugs for significantly lower cost. The problem though, is that these drugs are generally bad for health -by their own admission, people with chronic and potentially fatal conditions are rarely satisfied with how their drugs work yet they believe that it is a grand thing that they can buy them for cheap.
Those in favor of universal care also state that there are long waiting lines but that these are only for those who are trying to get non-emergency procedures and plus, objectively speaking, they’re not so long.
The problem with this is that they also admit two things 1) that there are some private medical services (not sure if they mean hospitals or insurance co.s). This means that potentially, the reason there are shorter waits is because people also can go to private services too. But 2) they admit that there are chronic conditions that are misdiagnosed, and do indeed present themselves as non-emergency conditions. So what this means is that simply, the health care system doesn’t actually help people with bad but mysterious illnesses because it can’t afford to treat everyone as an emergency condition and plus it has no incentive to even care about this. If an entire medical system is tax funded, and protected by law, then there is no incentive to worry that your services aren’t working and no incentive to research mysterious illnesses -in reality medical science stagnates and people are just willing to accept same-old, same-old.
But the biggest failure of national health care is that it can’t calculate. If the entire system controls all the capital goods for treating and curing people, then no market price can possibly exist for these goods and so no economising action can be taken vis-a-vis these goods: In britain people are denied drugs for cost purposes, in Canada different provinces have different health systems that vary in quality and indeed, I was apprised that a few years ago, it was common in canada to have 1970s medical tech. in 2005. Are these arrangements the best? No one knows since there are no markets.
Under a democracy the lack of calculation is replaced with majority vote. But the majority is not, in my experience, sympathetic to the views of the strange or radical. This is expressed mathematically as the median voter theorem. Ultimately this means that anyone cursed with a chronic disease, that has been poorly researched, and is slowly taking its toll or progressing is not going to be able to gain the care he/she needs since the chronically diseased is in fact, in the minority in every country and if given the choice to pay up-the-nose for care now, or to have to take time to convince 51% of everyone else that they need care; then I would bet that any of the sickly would gladly have “piratical” private free-market system than a gov. one.